10 Microsoft Word tips to boost your productivity and help you get more work done

Microsoft Word remains an enterprise productivity mainstay, with more than 90% of businesses providing Office to their workers, according to Forrester. Microsoft also recently acquired Intentional Software, to simplify the programming and automation of tasks for its collaborative Office 365 products.

“[Microsoft Word] is the familiar workhorse that creates our emails, reports, proposals, and just about every other document important to the daily operation of business,” wrote TechRepublic contributing writer Mark Kaelin. “Yet despite that popularity and familiarity, many quirks and tricks in Word go neglected and unused—tricks that could save us time and frustration if we could just remember them.”

Here are 10 popular TechRepublic articles with tips for becoming a Microsoft Word power user and gaining the most productivity from the program.

Word’s page and section breaks often create structural problems in documents for business users that they often do not know how to remedy. In this article, TechRepublic contributing writer Susan Harkins explains how to get rid of unwanted page and section breaks and keep your documents in order.

If someone sends you a Word document with lots of pictures, it can be tedious to select a single image, copy it, paste it into an image editing application, and save it. Here, TechRepublic managing editor Bill Detwiler explains how to either save the file as a Web page or unzip the .docx file to quickly save embedded images as individual files, depending on which version of Word you are using.

Displaying gridlines in Microsoft Word can help you position text, pictures, and other objects in your documents—though you can’t print out a document with the gridlines. In this article, Harkins explains step by step how to enable Word’s gridlines.

Business users can share data between Office applications easily—for example, you might use Word’s mail merge feature to complete invoices in a Word form using customer data from an Access database. However, it can get more complicated than this. Here, Harkins explains how to populate a Word dropdown field with Access data, and then use the selected value from that field to retrieve more Access data.

Many people do not know that Word can do basic diagramming, writes TechRepublic contributing writer Greg Shultz. The program’s diagramming features include the ability to create Cycle, Radial, Pyramid, Venn, and Target diagrams, as well as the more standard flow and organizational charts. In this article, Shultz offers an introduction to Word’s basic diagramming features, and how to use them to create professional diagrams.

Many enterprises are adopting the G Suite for collaboration and productivity. Google enables support for Open Document Format (ODF), which means that a business user can leverage the collaborative capabilities of Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, and then export their completed work to a file in an open, non-proprietary format. Here, TechRepublic contributing writer Andy Wolber explains how to do an ODF file transfer between Google Docs and Microsoft Word Online.

It’s easy to create a numbered list in Word, Harkins writes here. And thanks to all of the program’s numbering options, users have a lot of control over sequence and format. In this article, Harkins explains how to easily prefix each number in a list with descriptive text to make for more organized documents.

Microsoft Word’s most recent update includes new features for its Mac iteration, including new design, review, and collaboration capabilities. Here, TechRepublic contributing writer Erik Eckel walks business users through the features that could help them the most.

There are two ways to format a Word document: Apply formatting directly, or apply styles. In this article, Harkins explains how to use styles to improve efficiency and consistency in your business documents.

Microsoft’s Mail Merge feature can help enterprise users easily create form letters, addressed envelopes, and printed labels. In this article, TechRepublic contributing writer Scott Lowe explains how to use this feature to improve productivity.